Wasted: A Memoir Of Anorexia Nervosa

“We turn skeletons into goddesses and look to them as if they might teach us how not to need.” -Marya Hornbacher. Author of an autobiography titled, Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia, Hornbacher recounts her fourteen year old battle with her eating disorders. In today’s society, many people suffer from this impacting and life changing illness. Anorexia is a serious eating disorder that affects many people, both men and women. According to the National Association of Anorexia Nervosa and Associated Disorders, “at least 30 million people of all ages and genders suffer from an eating disorder in the U.S” (ANAD). While there are no exact causes to this mental illness, many in medical positions have concluded that anorexia can be developed

Many people who are involved in activities or hobbies such as a sport face the pressure of keeping their body in shape due to their surrounding environment of teammates and the standards for the team. Or, stress caused from a person’s environment, such as their family environment, can also lead to a development of anorexia depending on the vulnerability of the individual. According to The Center for Eating Disorders, “Families of those diagnosed with anorexia nervosa tend to be overprotective and rigid. Patients may describe their family style as being "suffocatingly" close, causing anorexia to develop out of a struggle for independence” (Center for Eating Disorders). The stress and wanting of independence developed from the environment forms an environmental cause in the development of the damaging eating disorder. The school environment can also cause the feeling of stress. Pressures such as exams and bullying of shape and weight in a school environment can have a lead to anorexia nervosa. Additionally, traumatic events in one’s environment such as physical or sexual abuse can have an impact. According to The Center for Eating Disorders, “ In some cases, the eating disorder is an expression of self-harm or misdirected self-punishment for the trauma. As many as 50% of those with eating disorders may also be struggling with trauma disorders”

Firstly, those who suffer from anorexia are at a higher risk of also having depression or anxiety. According to the Anxiety and Depression Association of America (ADAA), “33%-50% of people with anorexia also have coexisting psychiatric and physical illnesses, including depression, anxiety, obsessive behavior, substance abuse, cardiovascular and neurological complications, and impaired physical development” (ADAA). Because anorexia commonly occurs with other mental illnesses such as depression, this can also lead to an increased risk of self harming and suicidal thoughts, the effects of anorexia. Additionally, this disorder can also have an effect on relationships. Eating Disorder Hope, a network founded to end eating disordered behaviors, describes this relationship effect as, “No matter what the connection is — parents with an ill daughter; a husband with an anorexic wife — the relationship will be profoundly impacted, if not destroyed altogether. This is because such a disease is unfathomable to anyone who does not have it” (Eating Disorder Hope). Those who surround the anorexic, such as a friends and family are only seeing them as destroying themselves. This causes the anorexic to isolate themselves from the people they love, only focusing on their food intake and their weight. Overall, it damages the surrounding relationships that the individual suffering from anorexia has. Not only does anorexia have